Friction emerges in Bihar alliance ahead of election

New Delhi: Friction has emerged in Bihar’s ruling alliance for the Assembly polls scheduled for next year. While the JD(U) has started pushing for its chief and chief minister Nitish Kumar as the “main poll mascot” for the NDA campaign, the BJP wants to repeat the “equal number of seats” formula which the two allies had for the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections.

The majority within the state BJP are of the view that the current political situation is the “right time” for a saffron party chief minister, but the party’s top brass is not in favour of disrupting the NDA fold in the state.

The BJP, sources said, wants both Mr Modi and Mr Kumar to be the poll mascots. Both had contested the last polls in 2015 separately as the JD(U) had quit the NDA fold in 2013 over the then Gujarat CM and PM Narendra Modi’s elevation in the saffron party as the alliance’s Prime Ministerial candidate. Though the BJP won the 2014 Lok Sabha polls with a historic mandate, the party came at third position in the Bihar Assembly polls a year later.

Even though the two senior allies of the NDA camp in Bihar are yet to officially hold a meeting regarding the poll issue as the elections are scheduled by the end of next year, both have started preparing the groundwork for the polls.

Another ally Ram Vilas Paswan led LJP is also lobbying to contest on “respectable number of seats.” The JD(U) had recently launched poll slogans glorifying the leadership of Mr Kumar, who will soon launch a yatra reaching out to each district in the state before the polls.

For the BJP, sources said, election strategies will formally roll out after its ongoing organisational poll process is over by the end of this year. The BJP used its recently-concluded membership drive to both expand its organisational base and also enrol more people as its workforce to be engaged in poll-related activities.